But I couldn’t say all that, or any of that. And anyway, how could I explain what I meant in English?
My answers disappointed him.
Next to me, I could feel Gail tense up, her fists tightly glued to her thighs.
“There’s my mother’s store,” I ventured. What else could I say? “And I could continue cutting the grass and … take care of your houses when my father gets old.…”
“I see!” Robert Egan exclaimed with poorly hidden sarcasm. “Great projects there, my boy. Let’s drink to that!”
“Robert!” Mrs. Egan cried.
He opened another bottle of wine, poured a glass for Reverend Barnewall, who pretended to say no before accepting, his eyes gleaming. Vain protests from Mrs. Egan, a beautiful woman with disappointed eyes, who knew well there was no point anyway, while Gail sat in silence, frozen, only her eyes speaking to the apprehension of what she suspected would come. Robert Egan ignored them, he was among “men.” He got up, staggering, caught a wine glass in the oak cabinet behind him, filled it halfway and placed it before me, proud as if he were doing me favour, a favour among men.
“Robert, damn it! He’s a boy!”
Perplexed, I looked at the glass in front of me. We didn’t drink at home. Alcohol wasn’t even allowed in the house. My mother said it turned men into beasts, and my father did that at Jeff Loiseau’s place or with friends at the Jolly Roger.
“No, sir, no, thank you.”
“Oh, how reasonable! And how old are you, young man?”
“Fifteen.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“We don’t drink alcohol at home.”
“Catholics,” murmured the reverend, his eyes raised skywards.
Robert Egan burst out in a tinkling laugh. “My boy, this isn’t alcohol. It’s a Bordeaux. A great, a very great Bordeaux.”
“I don’t know what a bordo is. We don’t have any, at home.”
At that point, chaos erupted. Mrs. Egan got up from the table and stormed out of the dining room, pushing the swinging door violently. Next came the happy barking of Locki, the young Labrador that appeared in the room and ran around the table, his claws clacking on the wooden floor, looking for scraps. “Come now!” Robert Egan grumbled, “What’s with all the noise?” Françoise had disappeared into the kitchen. Ashen, the reverend stared at the dog as if afraid of being bitten. Gail caught him by the collar and dragged him into the living room. Teetering, the reverend got up, but Robert Egan caught him by the wrist. “You wouldn’t refuse a good cognac, now, Reverend?”
Half-heartedly, Ralph Barnewall sat back down. Robert Egan was laughing out loud now, as if he was thinking back to one of his favourite jokes. “Catholics! Those damned Catholics!”
Gail, furious with shame at seeing her father so drunk and so impolite, intervened, “Dad!” But Robert Egan continued to chortle with Reverend Barnewall, who’d become rather pale.
“You know what, Reverend? These Catholics … the ones from around here … the women … Well.…” He stopped himself, as if suddenly aware he was going too far. But no, in fact it was comedy, a theatrical gesture to increase his effect, “The poor women, Reverend, they’ve nowhere to get …” He brought his large, resentful face near the Reverend’s, “sanitary tampons!” Ralph Barnewall recoiled and his face burned red.
Gail began to scream, tears of rage in her eyes, in her throat, “Dad, shut up!”
And Robert Egan, as if his daughter was a ghost he couldn’t see, repeated, his head lolling back, making sure his joke had been heard, “Sanitary tampons, Reverend! My wife and my daughter have to stock up in Montreal. Don’t look for them here, they’re impossible to find … as rare as virtue among the girls of the all-American Bar.”
And Gail, again, “Please, shut up!”
Robert Egan leaned towards Ralph Barnewall, something soft and unctuous in the way he moved, like a snail without a shell, “Because they incite women to vice, according to our Catholic friends! Vice, Reverend! Can you imagine all these Catholic women.…”
“You disgust me!” Gail shouted. “Come on, Romain, let’s get out of here.”
9
January 1959, I remember it still. A snowstorm, with heavy, sticky snowflakes falling, a nor’easter blowing. Louis and I had gone to Clifford Wiggs’ place, that old nutter, something that had been formally forbidden. But there was no chance of being seen with the weather the way it was, and the snow and wind hid our tracks. Suddenly excited, Louis began making snowballs with pieces of ice inside, and threw one at an uncovered window of the garage, breaking it in a thousand pieces. Suddenly, laughing madly, he threw another, harder still, and a second window exploded. I yelled at him, and he called me a fag. By the time I got close enough to assess the damage, he’d disappeared, leaving not a trace behind. I couldn’t see a thing through the heavy curtain of snow that the wind made and unmade. He left me there by myself to deal with the consequences, the same as the day I saved Robert Egan from drowning.
Spending time with Louis was asking for trouble. He hated the English ever since his father’s fatal accident at the McArdle sawmill. They refused to compensate his mother, claiming he’d been drunk that day, as was often the case. Louis would never forgive them. His own brand of revenge was to attack their property, anything really, their houses and cars and even animals. I heard he was behind the disappearance of cats, as well as seagulls found broken on the rocky beaches. Killed with a slingshot. Standing before the broken windows, snow blowing in, I could feel anger growing in me, followed by dejection. I was to go back to the seminary in a few days, and return only when summer came. I had had diarrhea that morning, and pain in my stomach all day. Suddenly, from Beach Street, I heard a voice that put ice in my veins: “Hey, you there!”
My heart beating, I turned and saw a young man, a Montreal Canadians tuque on his head.
“You okay, my boy?”
Yes. Why? What do you want from me?
“Seeing you walk in the snowstorm, with your back bent and all, I told myself something was wrong.”
He walked towards me, his long black coat covered with snow, and looked over my shoulder, noticing the broken windows. “Who could have done that?” I felt myself weaken. There was no way he wouldn’t put two and two together. But instead he came back and stood before me, his face serious, as I shook with fear and cold in my heavy clothes, wet with snow. He said, softly, to my great surprise, “The wind, probably. I’ll take care of it tomorrow. Good old Wiggs won’t even know about it.” I hesitated when he offered me a cup of tea in his small white church barely visible in the snow — was he making fun of me? One of those churches that was visited by the English, most of them living at Pointe-Leggatt, all descendants of the Scottish immigrants whom John MacNider, the founder of Métis Beach, had convinced to come across in the early nineteenth century. They were people of modest station, like us — people who were from a different world, yet close enough for Fluke to hate us.
He introduced himself: John Kinnear, the new pastor of the United Church, barely twenty-three, with a wife and a baby on the way, his eyes free of judgment and full of laughter. He took my wet clothes and hung them near the sizzling heater in his cramped, spare office, which housed only two chairs and a table. He mentioned he should probably try to do something nicer with it, as if apologizing, but he’d just arrived. The Christmas service had been conducted by his predecessor, an old man with a bulbous nose I’d only seen a few times. He was retired now, but had taken everything with him. The young pastor was laughing, saying he needed to organize everything. We started talking about hockey, and he laughed when I told him we no longer ate Campbell’s soup at home since the riot at the Forum — “Clarence Campbell, Campbell’s soup, my father says the same difference.” The incredible laughter of that friendly man! And in the days to come, as I anxiously awaited my departure for the seminary, I sought his reassurance,
confiding in him as I had never done with anyone before — my fears, my anxiety. He was the only person in the world who wasn’t embarrassed when he said the word masturbation. We’d spoken about it one afternoon, for heaven’s sake, and the state I was in … stammering with embarrassment, my words all tumbling out together, telling how Father Bérubé at the seminary forced us to look at his damned Book Without a Title or The Perils of Onanism, a firm arm around our shoulders; sixteen ugly, old etchings, stained in some places, with a young man whose health declines from one picture to the next, until the last shows him emaciated, his body covered with sores, its caption reading, “At seventeen, he expires in terrible pain.”
Once again, that liberating laughter, “It’s nothing but rubbish, Romain. These days, we know that isn’t true. Medicine mentions it as part of the sexual development of an individual, as long as it isn’t done excessively or out of boredom. So, nothing to worry about, right?”
Nothing to worry about? What about those sinister stories repeated over and over by Father Bérubé, with his monkey eyes, his fetid breath, and his damn Book Without a Title under his arm, hammering in the lesson that we were risking eternity, “Earth is a steel ball in the universe.… This ball, every thousand years, a great black bird comes and grazes it with its wing.… When the grazing of the great black bird wears down the entire ball, well, then, it’ll only be the beginning of eternity!”
Once again, the young pastor’s laughter, his hand on my shoulder taking the sting out of the words, “Rubbish, Romain. That’s pure rubbish.”
Rubbish?
The anger I had felt then, a jolt of anger, like two hundred twenty volts through me. All these people lying to me — why?
And I returned to the seminary in Rimouski, revolted but far too scared to show my indignation. So I said nothing, bitterness in me, all of them liars, liars, and worse than liars, if what was said about Gaby Dumont was true. He was the smallest of us, easy prey, soft skin, milky even, not a single hair, not a pimple, almost a girl, that’s what the older kids said. “Hey, girl, show us your cock.” And immediately someone would inevitably answer, “Never mind, he’s keeping it for Father Johnson and Father Rivard.” Everyone laughed, and to my great embarrassment, I laughed a few times as well, though there was nothing funny about it, only tragedy. The luck we had not to be targeted, even though I never knew whether it was true or not, and none of us knew really. Little Gaby wet the bed, which was probably the reason behind his nocturnal comings and goings, but we had too much fun imagining something else, something degrading, with sex, and rumours circulated. And aren’t rumours more exciting than simply knowing that a thirteen-year-old still pissed his bed?
One night he got up silently, as he often did, and brought his sheets with him, as he often did. He tore them up and made a long rope with them, swinging them over the pipes in the bathroom. We found his body in the morning, his neck broken, his eyes popping out of his skull, his skin blue, tongue sticking out and shit in his pyjamas. The stench of it made our eyes water. Jokes were made, but not many, a shitter and a pisser to the end, but they were nervous, really, it was panic; we all had nightmares about it, some of us falling ill — I’d developed the symptoms of mononucleosis right after. His parents were told that their son was psychologically fragile, not made to be happy in a seminary — as if we were — and his parents, devastated, thought they were entirely responsible.
But we’d been the hangmen. With our cruel jokes. I felt so guilty I couldn’t return to the seminary, even once I’d gotten better.
I got out of the Jeep, my collar raised against the cold, and knocked on the door of John Kinnear’s church, with its white and forest-green sign — THE UNITED CHURCH OF CANADA, SUNDAY SERVICE: 11:00. No answer. Not much of a surprise. The last time we spoke, John had told me about a conference in Scotland at the end of October. He told me he’d be going with his wife and Tommy, and travel Europe a bit while they were at it. Still a shame, though. It would have been nice to talk to him. If he knew that I was here while he was away! So many years of him trying to convince me to change my mind, “Why don’t you come and visit us? It’s ancient history now. I don’t understand, Romain, feels like some sort of mental block to me.…”
Back in the Jeep, I put the heater at its highest setting. In my rear-view mirror, I saw Fluke coming towards me in his old Lincoln. He passed me without slowing down, though he did take the time to shoot me a contemptuous look. I thought back to the time I thought he might denounce me. It still made me laugh today, thinking back to those boxes of Tampax I’d found in my mother’s store, one night when my parents weren’t there. I’d been shocked at first, as if I’d found porno mags in my parents’ bedroom, but that was quickly replaced with pride — my mother wasn’t one of those Catholics Robert Egan mocked. She sold them, but to whom? Certainly not Dana who, one day, had gone to the store with her sister Ethel. Words had passed between my mother and them, sounds like axe or pax, and then my mother straightened, “Who told you?”
Dana mentioned Margaret Tees.
My mother sold them to Mrs. Tees, but not Mrs. Egan?
“Don’t worry,” Dana said, “thank you.”
And both women had left, perhaps a bit surprised by my mother’s reaction. But they had remained polite.
Their faces when I’d knocked on their door, a bag hidden under my jacket. Their irrepressible laughter, embarrassing me, “You’d think he was a pervert!”
“No, no, he’s far too sweet for that.”
No, impossible to forget that.
I put my foot on the gas, heading towards the clubhouse.
10
Thursday nights at the Métis Beach clubhouse!
They showed On the Waterfront, Buffalo Bill, Johnny Guitar, Moby Dick, and everything with Gary Cooper. Free entry. I was off to the movies with Jean and Paul, Françoise’s brothers. We were all terribly excited, with the sort of enthusiasm some hoped we’d have when it came time for confession. She’d be joining us later, once she was done in the kitchen at the Egan house, scrubbing pots and pans. Her hands were already calloused, and at her age!
We always sat in the last row, near the door, as if we weren’t entirely welcome among the youth of Métis Beach, though we knew we were supposed to be. After all, their parents — whom we worked for — kept telling us to participate in community activities. A way to contribute to our education, a social duty even, if not a type of charity. And so we’d go to the movies, filled with an equal measure of enthusiasm and apprehension. It wasn’t always easy to understand the plot of the movies, all shown in English. We’d have one eye on the screen and the other scanning the room, watching their reactions, trying not to embarrass ourselves — laughter, surprise, and fear we feigned with as much expertise as women feigned their pleasure, as I would realize with amazement years later when I watched When Harry Met Sally.
Thursday nights at the clubhouse! Cokes and chips bought at the small canteen with its aggressive neon lighting, enjoyed in the electrifying darkness of the room.
Gail would sit in the first row, flanked by Johnny Picoté Babcock, with his idiotic doe eyes, always ready to put his arm around her shoulders.
When she laughed, I roared; when she seemed affected by the plot, I put on a sad face; when she appeared to be scared, I prepared a reassuring smile for her.
She never turned her head in my direction.
I hadn’t seen Gail since that terrible night at her parents’ house when she’d taken me by the hand and dragged me into the garden, tears of rage in her eyes. She spoke of her father with anger and disgust, “It would have been better if you hadn’t been walking by that morning. He could have drowned, and I.…” I listened to her in silence, almost afraid. She had burning embers for eyes, promising a roaring fire to come, impossible to control. “I’m sorry, Romain. It was my idea, a stupid idea.” So Gail had been the one who insisted on having me over. That’s why her mother c
alled, “He saved your life, Robert!” And her father had relented, “Well, fine. But if we need to suffer through a boring evening with a shy boy, let’s at least invite that old Barnewall.…” Gail spoke rapidly on that cool, moonless night. She was steaming — and not particularly coherent — as if she expected to be interrupted at any moment, “I’ll never depend on a man like my father. He’s so arrogant! And I’ll never live my mother’s ridiculous life! I’ll be a lawyer. With an office and important clients! I’ll be independent! You understand? Do you understand?” All the while, I had an expression of such helpless envy sketched on my face. There was no need for a fancy education at a private Protestant college in Westmount for me to know that a woman who wanted to be a lawyer would never fall for a boy like me.
We hadn’t spoken since that fateful dinner. As if nothing at all had happened that evening.
I was so timid, for God’s sake! I envied the boys of Métis Beach who approached her with assurance, like Art Tees, always monkeying around to impress her. He whistled and jeered during love scenes on the silver screen, or when two people kissed. The scenes never failed to embarrass us boys from the French Village — but just one of Art’s jokes, and we all breathed easier.
Métis Beach Page 6